Rivera’s first quarter fourth down call was what we’ve been waiting for his whole career.
Perhaps the only upside to last Thursday’s blow out loss to the Steelers is that it afforded us little material upon which to base this column. The Panthers, for better or worse, had only one opportunity to make an aggressively conservative decision. Their failure was mostly on the players. We’d be auditioning for Cirque du Soleil if we could contort ourselves enough to blame Ron Rivera and his staff for this one.
The Panthers have been all over the place this season, but they have been trending towards being a more aggressive and more confident team. Half of the space in this column has been spent praising Ron Rivera for not punting on his opponent’s side of the field. The other half has been lamenting the early-season penchant for running the ball into loaded boxes or not trying to score before half time.
Counting our praise for Rivera as a win and our criticism as a loss week to week, you’d come up with a similar record as the Panthers. They are 5-3 in the Turtle, and that will be six wins after today. The records aren’t identical, however. We have praised them after losses and damned them after wins. Today is going to be another praise worthy loss for one reason: we aren’t talking at all about the fourth down the Panthers converted on their opening touchdown drive.
I’ll forgive everyone for forgetting the opening drive given what came immediately after. I like to remember it, though, because it was a magical time. The Panthers opened with more confidence and more success than I can remember seeing in years. They didn’t see a third down until they were knocking on the door of the red zone. It was a third and nine from the 30 yard line. Cam Newton scrambled for eight yards to set up fourth and one from the 22.
All seven Panthers teams that Rivera has coached in the past would be expected to kick the field goal and walk away from their opening drive with points. I don’t know if he is feeling better about his team or if Norv Turner has actually had that much influence. Either way, I like it. Christian McCaffrey got two yards on fourth and one and scored a touchdown on the very next play.
The Steelers game obviously didn’t hinge on the Panthers ability to convert that fourth down chance. It didn’t come down to the four point difference between that touchdown and the field goal everybody else expected them to kick. But we’ve all watched the games that did come down to that difference. Rivera’s lack of hesitation to go for it, to go for the win, is the kind of coaching I’ve been calling for his entire career.
The Panthers still have a lot of questions to answer about their current personnel and how suited they are for this or any NFL team after they got exposed on Thursday. As a fan, I’m head-in-the-sand hoping that the offensive line and the defensive secondary just picked the same day to have a historically bad day. I’m not, for the first time in a long time, worried about the coaching staff.
You can still expect to hear me calling for Ron’s job if he starts next year with the same timid approach that he kicked off this year as it puts the Panthers dangerously close to a losing record every year, but he’s not that guy right now. The guy who coached the Panthers in Pittsburgh is a guy who can win games. At the very least, he’s a guy who won’t make me angry about the way he loses them.
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